I won't discount the possibility of someone getting into this of their own free will out of hand. But I seriously doubt that it's going to remain this way long term. We have recent examples from Cambodia and Myanmar after all.

>>no one is forced into these things,

I was with you until then - hasn't it been documented over and over again that at least in some of these places people are basically slaves, they have their passports taken away, kept in a walled compound and not allowed to leave?

I had a similar problem with phone scams for my elder parents. Installed Asterisk with a Raspberry on their land line to allow only whitelisted numbers and the problem was solved. I guess someone has to step in at some point. Problem is not every parent has a tech literate child and the industry doesn’t seem to bother to offer decent solutions. All call blocker hardware that I found didn’t allow whitelist functionality. I guess there’s a business opportunity here easily, build hardware/software solutions to protect the elderly.

Encourage them to move their money to where it's at least more difficult to access.

Recently I discovered that my mam – a middle-class ex-civil-servant, not rich, but not poor – had £++ sitting in the account that was linked to the Visa card she carries around all day. Why? Just because she hadn't moved it elsewhere. Terrifying, obviously.

All she needed was my encouragement. I think it's in Premium Bonds now: not scam-proof, but at least not trivially scammable.

The advice I gave to my folks -- hard ignore any contact attempts not initiated by them. Dont read, dont answer the phone except from recognized numbers. I think thats the only way. No legitimate businesses call or text people out of the blue these days.

I dont believe in AI voice assistants picking up phones and filtering scammers. Those tbings will fight a losing game considering how the mainstream LLMs are built.

> Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?

You can become a legal guardian, and/or get access and shared ownership on their bank account and monitor it constantly. But yeah , it's a hassle.

Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?

"Ignore anyone asking you for money unless you know them and they do it in-person."

Honestly, not really. The problem is that often the scams are symptoms of a larger problem.

The elderly still want autonomy, and the scams adapt and change faster than education can get most of the elderly caught up to the risks. That's entirely removed from the technical aspects, which are a whole other level of education on risk. Scams always will move faster than defenders and efforts to block them.

All of which are divorced from the real problem, which is isolation of the elderly. The elderly often jump in to these scams simply because they just want someone to chat with. Many romance scammers will report that all they do is strike up a conversation with people, and quite often that's all it takes to get in deeper on an emotional level than the victim's entire family. The family treats this like a money problem, when it's an emotional gap the scammer is exploiting.

I had a neighbor once who was so poor her gas got turned off. Blind due to diabetes. Still managed to send half her meager social security check to a televangelist, because the televangelist was on TV in her face all day, and her family visited once a month. The elderly were prime candidates for 1-900 psychic numbers for decades because it was someone to talk to. I imagine your grandfather wanted to feel like he was helping someone, and scam letters gave him a perfect way to convince himself he was doing exactly that.

I assume AI assistants would be able to prevent a lot of this

> since I know firsthand how realistic these things can seem

Happened to a person close to me a few months ago and, indeed, it has become uncannily realistic. I'm surprised it hasn't attracted the attention of the relevant authorities, because harmless people are now being scammed of their live savings (or worse, in the case of the person close to me she had actually borrowed the sum she was scammed of) and no-one seems to be doing anything. It's also highly regressive, as in it seems to affect the people that would most need that money (in a way it's similar to how gambling affects the lower classes a lot more compared to the wealthy).

This paper is the one and only source for every claim from the past 10 years that "scammers make mistakes in scams on purpose." Crucially, no actual scammer or former scammer or even acquaintance of a former scammer has ever corroborated it. The paper itself is pure speculation.

If anything I think that paper serves best as a reminder that just because an idea is clever and logical, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.[1]

[1] As another example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

> By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

There's less need to identify the most gullible when AI drops the incremental cost of responding closer to zero.

I had a bash with that paper. It is pure and utter tosh - I started with the ... start and swiftly moved to 6. Conclusion.

"Thinking like an attacker is a skill rightly valued among defenders."

and

"Attacking as a business must identify targets, and this is easy only if we believe that attackers have solved a problem that has vexed multiple communities for decades."

Bollocks!

When the majority of a decades-long-scams' victims are Boomers getting hacked with AIs (clearing out your possibly-lesser inheritances)... does it still matter if the /u/usernametake29s of this world are still stuck thinking LLMs are "a scam" ? Still?

----

This thought-provoker is 100% human-derived.

#They'reMadeOutOfWeights

----

I didn't even realize how serious I was being, back in late 2022, when I was telling my Boomer friends (twice my age, but still closer than most "family") "make sure if you're grand-daugther calls 'begging for her life,' you need to ask the kidnappers something only she would know – and then *you can never ask that same question again (for verification, at least; ask whatever you want).

We are here.

If someone who is as unpopular as Elon the cringelord Musk can convince the markets that Tesla is worth its current stock price, I doubt the AI bubble will burst.

Do you plan to bet on this by buying PUTs? Should be easy money, right? /s

It's been used for defense for a long time. AI is why spam filters started actually working in the 2000s.

That's like calling stones fuel for violence. It's everyone's choice what they use the internet or stones for.

With all the Nigerian princes out there, you'd think one of the bastards would have already made an official claim to the throne.

the point though of a proper scam is to filter out the believables and find the guillibles.

You don't exactly want convincing evidence; you want a good story.

The main fuel is the "need" to have browsers that can execute code, coupled with the ability to transfer money via the internet. JavaScript was a mistake, e-commerce was a mistake, and so is everything else that came after.

Let's ask Vint Cerf whether the web was meant to run logic, or just be a document format. I bet no matter what he answers, the world would be like the GIF pronunciation "I don't care if the original creator said it's pronounced like giraffe, I'm gonna say it like gift because I KnOw BeTtEr"

Internet 3 when (because I know that academia does already have an "Internet 2", although I bet due to Internet 1 security issues, Internet 2 is already compromised too)

It's kinda hard to have a truly informed conversation about the scam industry since it's so secretive, but many of the scammers in Myanmar are actually incredibly big businesses that basically enslave people who otherwise wouldn't scam anybody. In those cases, the people who are actually making the choices are incredibly wealthy.

> Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable.

Dire economic conditions increase crime, that much seems true, but as long as it is profitable, there will be crime, under all economic conditions. It is, as you say, opportunism.

> Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable.

What is a "stable" economy? The US has the world's largest GDP, the highest nominal GDP per capita of any nation with a population over 10 million, the highest amount of investable and liquid private assets of any country in the world, more than a third of the world's millionaires, etc.

And yet I think you'd have a hard time convincing most people that the US is a bastion of ethics and morals.

Same for global migrants issues..as long as people in dirt poor/war torn/unstable countries can watch tik toks of fat people dancing and crying about first world problems while they starve on the streets or deal with gangs and infrastructure issues we will have migrant problem.. we live in a hyperconnected world these days

Viewing the world as haves and have nots and building giant Walls and moats and hyper-capitalism alone will never solve this..

You’re on a social media site filled mostly with AI bots right now. Try saying something negative about China in any thread

I simply don't answer calls from unknown numbers. I feel like it's my right as a grown-up.

This can backfire and they would go back to kidnapping people. Or they will humanize their ai.

That goes beside the point. Scammers probably boosted more their scams with AI than developers boosted their deliveries.

> Why not use AI to detect and avoid scams?

Why would the scammer go thru your detector?

So deepfakes and “AI was also used to generate synthetic identities that bypassed KYC checks, craft hyper-personalized phishing lures tailored to individual victims, and produce AI-driven malware capable of evading signature-based detection.”

Our most vulnerable must be getting absolutely hammered by scams. Is anyone working on protecting e.g. elderly people from social engineering? I feel like banks should be proactively suggesting people have a second family member or fiduciary sign off on risky transactions like wiring money to new accounts or pulling out a ton of cash.

I was recently on the phone with a very articulate member of my banks fraud department, or at least I believed they were up until they asked for my two factor code to reset my account. They had visibility into some past legitimate wire transfers which they asked me about along with a fictitious fraudulent one that they “blocked“, and when I pushed back against giving them my two factor code, they had a whole script prepared about needing to freeze my account until I went to a branch with four forms of identification (or just give us the two factor code and avoid the hassle). An acquaintance wired their down payment to a scammer after the real estate firms email system was compromised and scammer inserted their own wire instructions.

Not to mention reports of mythos directly hacking into banking systems. Scary times.

>Access to this site was denied for security reasons. Please contact your network or system administrator

Is what I see. Which makes sense I guess. Maybe just tell me how you got to the page?

We've banned this account. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> You know about the values of a culture, if they call your old parents to rip them off.

Large groups of people in a poor country steal from rich countries, and your explanation is a morally corrupt culture? not the obviously extremely poor prospects of it's citizens?

> They have none, or worse they can talk themselves into this "Robin Hood" psychosis, where stealing the pension from the elderly is just fine, because they are part of the upper crust of the world.

You're describing a cartoon character. Most of these people are trying to survive, not make some kind of twisted moral stand. Please try to recognise the privilege your place of birth affords you and how much of a global minority you are in. Incentives are everything here.

Whatever country you live in, I guarantee you have homegrown criminals from your culture too.

In the old days porn peddlers were the pioneers of digital.

> Crypto and now AI, every new tech we make these days it seems the main utility is just to enable criminals ...

It's nearly as if there was a lesson here about some individuals in the human race?

What was that yet about psychos? That 1% of all humans, no matter the socio-economic class, no matter the parents, are just full-on psychopaths.

The question is: what do we do, as a society, about those who only want to harm others?

>AI will be the one to cause the next financial crisis.

So what's the implication here? It sounds like you want AI canceled or curtailed, and if you apply the same logic to the internet in the mid 90s, you would have correctly called out the dotcom bubble. Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?

Can you elaborate? In the spirit of the rules of HN I'm trying to assume good faith and trying to conjure the strongest plausible interpretation of what you wrote, but I'm drawing a blank.

I wish they implemented this for a week so you could experience first hand the consequences of your ignorance when everything stopped working.